Moqups was designed with collaboration in mind because we figured that your team is probably a lot like ours: a group of creative professionals using comment threads to share feedback — both synchronous and asynchronous. That’s why we’re gratified that so many of you are using the Comment feature — and why we’re excited to see a huge spike in conversations within Moqups 2. We’re sure that you’ll love it…

We understand that as teams get larger, and projects more complex, real-time feedback becomes increasingly essential to the design workflow. But, as more collaborators join the conversation, the speed and volume of comments also accelerates. The result can be a swarm of information where it’s tough to distinguish between obsolete threads and current — sometimes urgent — messages.

If that’s your challenge, fear not! We’ve come to your rescue with new functionality that helps you clear away the clutter, and makes conversations cleaner and easier for your team.

Now, you can Resolve, or Resolve & Reply to comments, notify your team about those changes, Reopen resolved threads and, finally, clean up your page by hiding the resolved threads.

Let’s take a look at these features in action:

Mark Comments as Resolved

Once an existing comment has been read — and appropriate action taken — you can resolve the comment thread by clicking the Resolve button. The blue, numbered comment icon will be marked with a √ . We’ve even added a little animation to reflect the satisfaction of crossing another task off your list!

Filter To Show Unresolved, Resolved or All Comments

By default, you will now see only comments and threads that are Unresolved (i.e. active). But, just click on the Show drop-down menu and you can also choose to see All, or just Resolved comments. This will help you see the big picture: not only what’s unresolved, but what your team has accomplished — and the progress they’ve made!

Notify Collaborators using Moqups, Email or Slack

As you’d expect, whenever you Resolve or Reopen a thread, your team members and collaborators will automatically get notified by email — and in the popular Slack team messaging app. If you haven’t already enabled Slack integration within Moqups 2, just go to Account Settings → Notifications → and then follow the instructions from there.

Outline panel

We’ve made it much easier to navigate through the structure of complex projects. This is particularly useful if you have many elements on your pages. Also, it should make it much easier to work with those compound stencils from the Material Design, Bootstrap or iOS kits.

But there’s more to it! You can now assign meaningful names to the items on your page. Doing this helps you easily find them later on and stay organized as the complexity of your pages will grow. Your colleagues will also appreciate it.

Do you have work in progress that you need to hide because you’re not ready to show it yet? You can hide it by toggling the visibility of your stencils. It even works for groups!

Here’s the summary of this new feature:

Click the Outline icon on the left sidebar to open the new panel (or press ALT+3)

To select objects, click the items in the outline tree. If the selection is a group, you can expand it by clicking the left arrow icon and access its inner structure

Hovering the items in the outline tree will highlight the corresponding objects on the page with a blue border

Double click the items in the outline to rename them

To toggle the visibility of your items, hover them in the outline panel and then click the small eye icon

@mentions in comments

Do you need to draw the attention of your collaborators or team members on a specific comment thread? Do this by mentioning them in a comment. You’ve already used this functionality on those time wasting social networks. To mention someone, type the @ character, followed by the first letter of their name, username or email. An autocompletion popup with suggestions should show up once a match is found. You can also trigger it by clicking the small “@” button on the bottom right of the comment popup. Once you send the comment with @username mentions, those users will get an email notification.

Select text in view mode

Selecting text in the viewer was not possible until now. This made it hard to share copywriting content with your peers. This functionality was conflicting with the interactivity features (e.g. hotspots), so we had to disable it. To fix this issue, we’ve added a Select text mode in the viewer. Click the button with the cursor icon on the top toolbar of the viewer to enable this mode. Once toggled, all the texts on the project will be selectable so you can copy them to the clipboard.

Inspector align toolbar

We’ve added a toolbar for getting a speed boost when aligning your objects. No more extra clicks. We made sure it stays sticky if the inspector needs scrolling, so you’ll always have it handy when you need it. One of our customers was persuasive enough to make us start a hackathon and deliver this within a day. Thank you!

Hide contents outside page

It’s now possible to clip the content that’s sitting outside the page bounds. We’ve noticed that some users find it useful to have objects sitting outside the page for easy reusing, while others like the app to automatically hide the excess content. What to do, what to do? This is now an option in the workspace settings, below the page size inputs. Yet another heavily requested feature that we implemented during a productive coding spree.

We’re wondering how much coffee our designer is drinking lately because he’s on fiiire. Here’s another nifty addition to our existing stencil library. The Bootstrap framework is one of the most popular HTML and CSS frameworks out there. The new stencils will come handy for quickly designing high fidelity websites that are based on this framework.

Like the stencils from the recently launched Material Design kit, these are also compound stencils. This means you’ll have to double click the stencils to access their inner elements and sub groups to customize their contents and appearance. You can find the new stencils under the Bootstrap category in the Stencils sidebar on the left of the app.

Let us know what you think or if there’s anything else you’d like to see added.

Please note that like the iOS stencils, these are compound stencils, which means that they are groups of basic stencils (e.g. shapes, labels, icons and so on), configured to depict various user interface widgets in great detail. This approach allows you to have complete control over appearance of the user interface, so the components of your UI can evolve with your designs, without being restricted by the rigid structure of the basic stencils.

Whether you should use the basic stencils or compound stencils depends a lot on your needs. Typically, you will most likely want to use the compound stencils when you’re working on high fidelity mockups, which are getting closer to the final design. In contrast, the basic stencils are suitable for the initial exploratory work and brainstorming sessions, where speed and convenience are key.

Resizing and editing the compound stencils is also a bit different. While the basic stencils will resize without distortion because of their simple structure and layout, the compound stencils will require you to access (by double clicking) the inner objects or the groups inside and adjust them individually. Same goes with editing their contents. If you’ve used more advanced graphical editors in the past, you’ll feel right at home with this approach.

Just a few days ago we’ve been announcing the revamped export system. Today, we’re happy to roll out new export functionalities.

Trim to content bounds

If you enable this checkbox, the image size will be automatically resized and positioned to fit the exact visible content of your pages. This is particularly useful if you want to use the exported PNGs for embedding in web pages, wikis or even in your apps. It also saves you from doing this task manually.

Transparent background

Tick this checkbox so your pages will have transparent background when exported to PNG. Combined with the Trim to content bounds feature, the assets you generate with Moqups should become much more useful for your day-to-day use cases.

We’re working hard to add even more exciting export functionalities in the upcoming weeks. These will help you automate your workflows and give you a well deserved productivity boost. Stay tuned — we’re just warming up!

Now that Moqups 2 is out, we’re committed to increasing the pace for releasing new features. Here’s what we have in store for you this month:

Font weights (beta)

Many fonts come with lighter and bolder variants. In the typography industry that’s called “font weights”. Juggling with font weights is useful to improve the aesthetics of your design and make it look more professional.

This one was sitting on our backlog for too long. One of our customers was persuasive enough to make us start a hackathon and see how fast we can deliver. It turned out to be a good idea. Thank you, fellow customer!

Why is it still in beta?

We’re still fiddling with some issues related to exporting. This, in turn, also triggered an unstoppable desire to revamp the entire export system. So we’re doing that now. Please bear with us. We’re almost there.

Markdown in comments

Markdown allows you to format your text using a simple syntax that anyone can understand. Simple formatting for making text *italic*, **bold** or creating lists is now possible. That’s because it’s so simple. But you can add headings, images, strikethroughs, links and tables too, using the same formatting. And whatnot. That’s simple as well.

Transfer your projects to other accounts

Sometimes you need to change the ownership of an existing project. You sold your teammates on the usefulness of a premium Moqups account (THANK YOU!) and you want to use its perks to take the project that you started in your account to new levels of awesomeness.You need to hand off the amazing work you’ve completed to your customers. You’re changing jobs and someone else needs to take over your work. Reasons can be many.

This process used to have a fair amount of bureaucracy in it. It involved a lot ping pong between users and our support staff, so we thought it’s time to automate it. To start a transfer request, go to your projects and then click Transfer to another account from the More menu. You’ll be guided on what to do next from there. Here’s a short video on how it works:

Notable bug fixes & improvements

As always, we’re constantly making bug fixes and improvements. From now on you’ll see a blue bar on top of the app whenever we have a new release, so you can stay in touch

Flipped the Align Vertical Centers and Horizontal centers icons. Dan (aka “Dan from Moqups“) was somehow under the impression that the wrong way is the right way. And then he convinced the whole office about this. For years. He’s changed his mind again — many thanks to all the users who persuaded him to see the truth clearly

Fix: Opacity setting in the color picker is not visible

Fix: Sometimes images would get pasted in the wrong place

Fix: iOS Components category was hidden when not logged in

Fix: Ctrl/CMD + click on an image opens it in new tab on Firefox

Fix: Toggling the left sidebar in view mode moved the hotspots in the wrong position